Teaching Asian Texts through Bridge Concepts

Bridges give us access to unconnected places, places we would have found unreachable or difficult otherwise. Bridge concepts, too, give us access to spatially, temporally, and culturally unconnected discussions that may seem unreachable or difficult, and they can be effective teaching tools. I’ve used them to incorporate Asian — specifically, classical Chinese — texts into my teaching, and I hope sharing them will give you some ideas for your own class.

I came to Chinese philosophy through aesthetics. I was already developing an interest in philosophy of music, partly because of my music-playing background, when I had the good luck of taking Jennifer Wang’s “Introduction to Chinese Philosophy” during my second year of grad school (the only one my department offered in the past five years). I was surprised to notice the plethora of art-related discussions in Confucianism, and I went on to write my term paper discussing the role music plays in Confucian moral cultivation. Chinese philosophy opened up a new world for me, not only because I was engaging with a different tradition, but because my knowledge of East Asian languages and way of life were all the sudden philosophically relevant.

Autobiographical confessions aside (but a lesson: diversity in content really is important for recruitment!), I imagine instructors are interested in diversifying their course content, and one important way to do so is including discussions and readings from “non-western” traditions. Given its rich history and shared questions with contemporary philosophy, Chinese philosophy can easily be incorporated into philosophy classes, especially with the help of bridge concepts.  (I’ll stick to what I know in this post, but the general method, I suspect, will also work with other Asian, African, and Indigenous American philosophy.)

I came across bridge concepts while reading Aaron Stalnaker’s Overcoming Our Evil, a work of comparative philosophy engaging with Augustine and Xunzi. Stalnaker writes:

“Bridge concepts are general ideas, such as “virtue” and “human nature,” which can be given enough content to be meaningful and guide comparative inquiry yet are still open to greater specification in particular cases…they are chosen specifically to facilitate a particular comparison of a delimited number of objects… as general topics, bridge concepts may be projected into each thinker or text to be compared as a way to thematize their disparate elements and order their details about these anchoring terms.” (17)

Placing Augustine and Xunzi in an imaginary dialogue with each other helped Stalnaker pick out four different bridge concepts: “human nature,” “spiritual exercises,” “person,” and “will.”

I like bridge concepts because they don’t make us assume that other philosophical traditions are valuable only when they help us make progress in current (analytic) philosophy. They also don’t assume that the neglected tradition has and needs its own bubble for proper appreciation. Important questions have been asked in different cultural settings in different times, and bridge concepts recognize this simple, and pedagogically valuable, fact.

Bridge concepts aren’t necessarily new as a practice, and though Stalnaker’s work is in comparative ethics, bridge concepts also work for other subfields of philosophy. For instance, John Ramsey also discussed his own bridge concept previously on this blog (though he didn’t call it that) in the context of teaching Descartes’ and Zhuangzi’s epistemologies together; he used “foundations of knowledge” as a conceptual bridge connecting Descartes’ skepticism to Zhuangzi’s relativism and perspectivism.

A bridge concept I’ve used in an aesthetics class is “art-induced-moral-cultivation.” In philosophy and literature, debates continue whether literature (esp. fiction) morally improves its readers. Martha Nussbaum and others argue that literature helps us value the life of others and that literature teaches us how to approach complex moral situations with care and nuance. Some, including Richard Rorty, focus on empathy and argue that literature “expands the circle of the human,”the set of people we readily empathize (and even identify) with. However, others are skeptical of literature’s role in moral improvement; Joshua Landy, for instance, argues that works of fiction “preach to the converted alone” because they are powerless to shake deeply held beliefs—fictions can be read and interpreted in any old way to confirm what we already believe. And even if and when fiction morally improves its readers, it only seems to have such an effect on those who were already seeking, or at least open to, being influenced in such ways — which suggests that there is nothing unique about the work fiction does.Philosophers are also worried about agents “wasting” their moral energy on fictional texts, patting themselves on the back for being thoughtful agent, then failing to act in morally virtuous ways in their real lives.

Classical Chinese philosophers, too, talk about art in the context of moral cultivation, especially music. Kongzi (Confucius) considered music education the core of not only the moral development of a person but also the foundation of a humane society, but Mozi considered music (or at least musical performances) an extravagance that didn’t produce enough benefits to justify its costs. Xunzi, a later Confucian, gave music a nearly magical power, saying that it has the ability to transform people quickly. Reviewing Mozi’s debate with the Confucians regarding art’s value, as well as Kongzi and Xunzi’s (and perhaps Mengzi’s) descriptions of the relationship between music and moral cultivation, naturally introduces the student to two parallel (ancient Chinese, contemporary analytic) discussions of art and moral improvement.

I’ve also used “impartiality” as a bridge concept in an ethics class called “Philosophy of Love and Care.”In contemporary discussions about impartiality, philosophers debate whether “special relations” — e.g. family and close friends — enjoy a special status and disagree whether partiality is justified, and if so, to what degree and why. The debates touch upon questions about whether there are good reasons to permit partiality and whether being impartial is even possible for humans—which are points that Mohists (followers of Mozi) found themselves debating the Confucians on.

Confucians believed that there were five relationships at the center of human social life (ruler-subject; father-son; older brother-younger brother; husband-wife; friend-friend) and argued that we owe stronger moral obligations to those with whom we enter into these special relationships. They also thought that each one had a distinctive moral character and depended more than the others on certain virtues (for example, the friend-friend relationship depends more on trust than the ruler-subject relationship). The family was an especially important social unit for Confucians; they thought agents learn how to be moral as a part of a family (e.g. respecting the boundaries of others and oneself in the family helps one develop integrity). The centrality of the family also acknowledged our strong emotional attachment to them, and so differentiated caring was understood and justified by the strong(er) moral obligations arising from the special relationships. Differentiated caring, they thought, actually matched human practice instead of making unrealistic (i.e. impartial) demands — and, of course, differentiated caring didn’t mean that we should neglect strangers but that one ought to simply care for one’s family more.

Mohists, on the other hand, believed that this was nepotism and called for impartial caring for everyone. Perhaps this was because the Mohists were also the first consequentialists — they argued that actions are judged by their “benefits” (a technical term denoting wealth, population, social order, and minimizing poverty, depopulation, and social chaos); they sought a “fixed standard” that would determine what is right or wrong, and in addition to counting benefits, they also thought that one ought to adopt the perspective of Heaven, something that sounds a lot like Sidgwick’s “point of view of the universe.” The moral ideal, then, was impartiality or fairness without considering of one’s own community, family, or friends: ultimately, we owe the same moral consideration to everyone (even though there might be instrumental, contingent, or more generally “derivative” reasons for favoring one’s own family and friends). Mengzi, speaking for the Confucians, retort that practicing this kind of impartiality is to be “without a father” since regarding all people as having the same ultimate claim on one is, in some sense, to lack special relationship with anyone. Agreeing that impartiality isn’t intuitive, the Mohists present a thought experiment (a first in Chinese philosophy!) involving someone going on a long trip and asking a neighbor to take care of his family to show that impartial caring is the more ideal way to live.

Again, the bridge concept here was “impartiality” and by showing how ancient Chinese debates are directly parallel to those taking place in contemporary moral philosophy, the instructor is able to shorten the spatial, temporal, and cultural distance to organically present the very same worries we’ve had for a long time.

In the end, bridge concepts take advantage of the wide-ranging phenomenon in the history of philosophy that it is rare for a question or a topic to have been entirely unique to one culture and time; recognizing this fact allows instructors to use bridge concepts to encourage conversations among thinkers from disparate times and places. I hope the above examples from ethics, epistemology, aesthetics, and moral philosophy gives you the tools to introduce classical Chinese philosophy in your classes and equip you to come up with your own bridge concepts for other traditions in philosophy. 

Possible texts for student assignment/reading:

Art-induced-moral-cultivation: Xunzich.20, “discourse on music”; Mengzi1B, 4A27; Analects3.3, 7.6, 8.8, 14.12, 14.39, 15.11, 16.13, 17.9, 17.10, 19.7;Mozich.32 “A Condemnation of Musical Performances”

Impartiality: Mengzi 3A5, 3B9, 4A19, 4A27.1-2, 3B10+7A34; Mozich.16 “Impartial Caring”

Concise introductions to these thinkers can be found in Bryan van Norden’s Introduction to Classical Chinese Philosophy and his and P.J. Ivanhoe’s Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP) also has entries on Mengzi (Mencius), Xunzi, Kongzi (Confucius), and Mohism. I’ve also been recommended Chris Fraser’s The Philosophy of the Mozi: The First Consequentialists?

Much of the primary text selections above can also be found in Readings in Classical Chinese Philosophy, 2^ndedition.

Acknowledgement: I’d like to thank Justin Tiwald, Jennifer Wang, Aaron Stalnaker, and Quinn White for helpful conversations and suggestions. I’d also like to thank Dr. Sabrina D. MisirHiralall for inviting me to contribute as a blog post this material I would have presented at the 2020 APA-Pacific.

Hannah Kim

Hannah H. Kim is a Ph.D. candidate at Stanford University with interests in aesthetics, metaphysics, and Chinese and Korean philosophy. She is also an assistant editor for the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy(SEP).